


never should've come here

by papertzarina



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Gen, No One In The Guild Knows The Dragonborn Is The Dragonborn, Sad Ending, Some Liberties Taken With The Mercer Frey Bossfight, The violence isn't that bad, albeit admittedly by my standards, and that's not a healthy moment in anyone's life, but make it fashion, feels like she could conquer the world and everyone, kleptomaniacal power-hungry protagonist, should be thankful she isn't conquering the world, the dovahkiin is at a moment in her life where she
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-04 18:57:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15847356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papertzarina/pseuds/papertzarina
Summary: “Karliah, when will you learn you can’t get the drop on me? Especially with your… rathernoisycompanion of choice.” | Dovahkiin faces a thief she considered an acquaintance, and then another one who'd considered her a friend. She wins the physical fight. Also, potato soup makes a cameo.





	never should've come here

The trio snuck inside the chamber, watching as their ex-leader pried an Eye off the massive statue.

“He’s here, and he hasn’t seen us yet,” whispered Karliah. “Brynjolf, watch the--”

**_“MERCER FREY, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”_ **

The man himself pocketed the Eye and turned around, mildly surprised at the familiar voice. Hadn’t been in his plans to interrupt their chatter so soon. On the opposite end of the room, Dove lowered her hood with a shake of her head, sword gripped tight and a fire spell getting squished in her off-hand.

“Karliah, when will you learn you can’t get the drop on me? Especially with your… rather _noisy_ companion of choice.” The platform broke, Dove was sent sprawling to the floor, and a large rock fell on her chest and bounced off. The half-elf shoved off the bits of dust and rock coating her and began raising herself back up, coughing out dust. She growled. Mercer Frey vaguely appeared in her field of vision, on top of a large rock.

“When Brynjolf brought you before me,” he began, “I could feel a sudden shift in the wind. And at that moment, I knew it would end up with one of us at the end of a blade.”

“Give me. The _key_. Frey.” Dove was shivering out of sheer anger. That was impressive.

“Hah! What’s Karliah been filling your head with? Tales of thieves with honor? Oaths rife with falsehoods and broken promises?” He shook his head. “Nocturnal doesn’t care about you, the Key, or anything to do with the Guild.”

“I don’t care what Nocturnal thinks. This is personal!”

“Revenge it is? Have you learnt nothing of your time with us?” He stepped backwards and gestured grandly. “When will you open your eyes and realize how little my actions differ from yours? Both of us lie, cheat, and steal to further our own end.”

Dove’s eyes widened. He knew? _Play your cards as close to your chest as possible, Dove_ , she told herself. She blinked, trying to handle herself. “The difference is that, that ah, I, I only lie by omission, and I at least, I have a sense of _honor_ , asshole. The key isn’t-- a factor.” She hoped he hadn’t guessed who she was; she’d rather take him by surprise. Her stuttering wasn’t helping ease her nerves.

“Then it’s clear you’ll never see the Skeleton Key as I do… as an instrument of limitless wealth. Instead, you’ve chosen to fall over your own foolish code.”

“I don’t care about codes, Frey! I don’t care about the Skeleton Key. I only know you betrayed me, you betrayed my friends, and the only person that’s going to fucking fall tonight is you, on my blade, several times.” She chewed on the side of her cheek, still a little anxious. The taste of copper bloomed inside her mouth for a brief moment. Mercer Frey didn’t seem to notice.

“Then the die is cast, and may my sword taste once again Nightingale blood!”

And Dove set off.

As she ran up the stairs, Frey disappeared, reappearing closer to the statue. She zoomed towards him, shooting fireballs he got busy on deflecting while she climbed their height difference. Dove raised her sword and levied it at him, and Frey parried it effortlessly. Metal hit metal a couple of times, and then Dove managed to grab the edge of his clothes and set it on fire with her off-hand. Frey then went invisible and reappeared away from the fight, to the opposite stairway, with the fire seemingly put out while invisible.

“Oh no you’re not!” Dove yelled out. She went backwards until her back hit the wall and then broke into a lightning run, jumping at the last possible second and describing an arch on the way to Frey, her sword lifted up in the air and tightly gripped with both hands. Her blade hit him in the left neck-to-shoulder joint, shattering his left collarbone and sending him careening towards the wall. He grunted in pain and went invisible, reappearing a couple seconds later further up the stairs. He was tightly gripping his shoulder. Dove sprinted up to him and brought up her sword, but was taken by surprise by a spell he lobbied at her feet. She jumped to avoid the spell, and Frey took the opportunity to try to slice up her torso. He missed, due to her jump, but he managed to make a nasty cut on her thigh, his blade touching bone.

And that’s when all Oblivion broke loose, because then Dove screamed, or maybe roared, in a way that didn’t seem human, and then Shouted.

**FUS**

**RO**

**DAH**

And Mercer Frey was sent, once again, careening back, his sword forcibly ousted from Dove’s thigh with a disgusting wet noise. He fell on his back, definitely breaking several ribs, and coughed weakly.

Slowly, Dove rose up the stairs, her furious shiver back. One hot, thick tear welled up in her eyes and fell, and then another, and they made a dripping noise as they hit the stone floor at Frey’s feet. His eyes were wide open, and his sword had fallen away from his hand, clattering halfway off the edge. Karliah and Brynjolf’s fight seemed to have ended as soon as she had Shouted, both of them staring at her now. It was an understatement to speak of their faces as surprised.

Dove grinned wildly, and the too-sharp canines nobody had ever questioned why she even had seemed to grow bigger in the torchlight. The coppery taste, red and warm, wasn’t visible, since she’d bitten herself with further-back teeth, but the blood could be felt through her grin, dripping and suspiciously Frey-like. He hadn’t known, in the end. He’d been making false accusations...

“You know, Frey, you’ve made a lot of mistakes,” she told him. One tear, one single angry tear rolled down her cheek, and she licked it without ever stopping grinning. “But one was really bad, and I’m about to tell you which one it is.” She raised her sword with both hands.

“You should have never fucked with the Dragonborn.”

And she drove the blade deep into his heart.

And again. And again.

And again.

And again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, until Karliah finally cried out, “STOP!”

The water kept filling the chamber as Dove slowly turned around. Her grin had diminished, but was still there.

“Sorry, lady and gentleman. Got a little carried away. My apologies.” She smiled sheepishly, flecks of blood dotting her face.

“We’ll talk about all of this later,” Brynjolf decided. “We’ve ought to go now.”

“You two find the exit while I rob the bastard’s body, alright?” Dove told them. She knelt to do so. Brynjolf had robbed his share of dead bodies, but the way Dove said it was… _fuck_. They walked towards her, boots sloshing in the rising water, and watched her pocket some final septims and slide his sword into one of her innumerable empty sheaths. She picked up the bag holding the Eyes of the Falmer and turned around to face them.

“Exit is… that way,” Karliah hesitantly told her. She didn’t seem as shocked by Dove’s actions as Brynjolf had been, but she was still a little doubtful. Maybe it was because she hadn’t known Dove as long as he had.

“Thanks!” Dove chirped. She rubbed at her own face with the back of her hand and walked off towards the exit. Brynjolf met Karliah’s gaze.

“Come on, snails!” Dove’s voice rang from ahead.

“Let’s go,” Karliah told him, resigned. She began wading towards the exit in the now knee-height water, and Brynjolf followed her after a moment, sparing one last second to watch Mercer Frey’s corpse float behind them.

They exited the tunnel, and the sunlight blinded Dove’s eyes for a second. “Ouch,” she said. “ _Owch_ ,” she repeated, with more emphasis, after gripping her leg tight. She sat down outside the cave and pulled off her knapsack. Brynjolf stared at her. She rummaged through it (pausing to give Karliah the Key), before finally coming up with a health potion and a flask of unknown contents. She downed the potion before taking a swig from the flask, and then realized Brynjolf was staring at her. “It’s soup,” she told him, to appease him.

“So, lass,” he begun after a moment. Dove picked herself up and stretched.

“Yes?”

“...You’re--”

“The Dragonborn?”

“The Dragonborn. Let me finish my damn sentences.”

“Sorry. Yes, I’m the Dragonborn. I… apologize for not really mentioning it earlier.” She shrugged, a sheepish expression in her face. “There was a Thalmor spy that found me out the first time I came to Riften. I disliked the idea of divulging further my identity.”

Brynjolf felt a little dizzy. Thalmor spies, huh. “Lass, please stop talking.”

“Oh. Alright.”

He inhaled. “You’re the Dragonborn, and you didn’t tell anyone, and you’ve been in the Thieves’ Guild for two weeks and killed Mercer Frey, who betrayed us all. And there was a Thalmor spy in Riften.”

“Y...es.”

“And we’re both promised to Nocturnal now. A Daedric Prince is getting the Dragonborn’s soul after her death,” he belatedly realized.

“Oh, she won’t,” Dove told him, offhandedly.

“She won’t?”

“I promised my soul, but I’ve got several,” she explained. She begun walking away, following after Karliah, who’d left in the direction of the Guild already. Brynjolf trotted after her after a moment.

“What in Oblivion do you mean you’ve got several?” Brynjolf kept getting dizzier and dizzier.

“As the Dragonborn,” she told him, with the conspiratory air of someone who’s enthusiastic to explain something she’d been waiting to talk about, “I absorb dragons’ souls after killing them. Nocturnal will obtain one of those. I’ve actually got one singled out -- there’s this one dragon I fought a while ago, Volumviing--”

“You’re going to give a Daedra a Dragon’s soul to get out of giving her your own soul.” _And I’ll be in her service forever,_ he thought.

“It’s the same deal to her, isn’t it? And this dragon ambushed me and was fairly stealthy, I’m sure she won’t mind--”

“I thought I knew you,” Brynjolf told her.

“I…” Dove blinked, surprised. “You do know me.”

“I didn’t know this.”

“I told you, there was a Thalmor spy--”

“I just watched you kill one of the best thieves I’ve ever met with your own two hands! And you kept stabbing!” _You laughed over his corpse,_ Brynjolf wanted to say. _He didn’t know you were the Dragonborn, either, and you enjoyed it -- you enjoyed enlightening him at the last possible second. He was a traitor, but he’d been our Guildmaster for so long and I think I’m still coming to grips with his betrayal, and you just_ killed _him. He was dangerous, a danger we needed to hunt, but you killed him and you laughed and you kept on stabbing him._

“Okay, maybe I could’ve killed the Thalmor spy! And maybe I could’ve killed the next one!”

Both of them had stopped now.

“This isn’t about the Thalmor!” Brynjolf at this point was nearly screaming. Karliah was nowhere to be seen. “Do you think _I’d_ rat you out to the Thalmor?!” _This isn’t about you telling me,_ he thought _. This is about something else._

“ _No!_ I don’t know why I didn’t tell you, but I never owed you an explanation!”

_This is about the grin in your face as you killed him._

“You’ve never told me anything about yourself, Brynjolf! For all I know, you could secretly be the Emperor!”

_This is about that single fucking teardrop. This is about the taste of blood. This is about the fangs, like a wolf’s._

“You don’t get to make me feel awful about keeping secrets when you--”

“You enjoyed it.”

Dove froze. Slowly, her face moved, her mind rewatching the entire conversation until now. There was a silence, a frozen silence before she spoke. “I fucking did.”

“Why did you enjoy killing him?”

“He betrayed us!”

“He betrayed us, but you’re our newest member, Dove! This isn’t about anger at an old friend’s betrayal. You didn’t know him that well. Why did you enjoy it?”

Dove looked at him, and for an instant Brynjolf felt like he’d gone too far. There was a fire in her eyes that he couldn’t believe had missed the meaning of during their entire friendship, and her right hand held one of the swords she so liked keeping on her body tightly. Brynjolf felt, for a moment, scared for his own life. And _something_ must’ve changed in his expression, because suddenly Dove blinked widely, owlishly, at him, and she seemed surprised. And she seemed fearful.

“Oh,” she whispered. She shook her head and continued walking, faster than before, leaving Brynjolf behind her in the snow.

When he caught up to Karliah, she was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t catch up with them during their ride, either. Nor was she there when they arrived at the Guild.

She’d left.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm still not entirely confident in the argument, but to be truthful IRL arguments are often that messy, at least for me, so.
> 
> i've toyed a bit with some alternate endings to this fic, actually, but it never really worked out? so.
> 
> she does patch things up with brynjolf, but she does it... waaaaaaaaaay later. months later. several months later. don't worry. (i'm itching to write a sequel, honestly, so -- stay tuned, maybe? if you care about this, hah)


End file.
